Harare Review of Books

200 pp. August 19, 2025, Coffee House Press. Fiction.

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Coffee House Press continues to bring us work from the slightly unhinged fringe with this “novella” where Comitta has taken all of their lines from seemingly hundreds of works (that are now out of copyright) and made a quilt out of them (with an extensive bibliography at the end of the book). Their inspiration, they say, is not only their previous The Nature Book (where they took “nature descriptions from three hundred … novels”) but also a painting by David Hockney called Nichols Canyon:

“I realized I could apply this technique—a combination of disparate patterns that form a cohesive, unified work—to fiction.”

The result is yes, at first bewildering, and then surprisingly entertaining and really quite clever. It’s loosely a story about a man who’s in love with Catherine and it’s also the story of a lost snuffbox. As you can imagine from how it was made, lots of weird things happen (mass flight from who knows what, and there’s a duel towards the end of the book—I love duels). Additionally, a whole section shows the narrators path home in images (XXIV: BEING A VISUAL RENDERING OF MY WALK HOME). A laugh-out-loud (it was for me) chapter is all ellipses, em dashes, underscores etc; readers of pre-20th c. lit will be very familiar with this bewildering convention. There’s that one with the very liberal use of the letter b. The one with lots about the sun not yet being risen is illuminating. And then that one chapter full of the author’s self-admittedly juvenile use of many instances of the word “ejaculate.”

It’s a richly visual book, and I rather wish I’d had my hands on a physical copy.

Anyway, I really liked this Frankenstein’s monster! I’m quite impressed with the number of hours Comitta must have put into both researching it and making it work. It’s pretty smart. And in this world where human creativity is increasingly devalued by tech bros, this is a wonderful reminder of what we can do.

Thanks to Coffee House Press and Edelweiss for an early DRC.

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